The Unfalsifiable Church: Why Catholic Apologetics Resists Historical Scrutiny

By David Straw I www.virtueonline.org I July 14, 2026

This is a follow-up piece: Palace on a slope: Why coherence isn’t the same as truth https://www.virtueonline.org/post/a-palace-built-on-a-slope-why-coherence-is-not-the-same as-truth

In A Palace Built on a Slope I described a closed theological system some Roman Catholic apologists have constructed. I called it the Mind Palace. It operates like Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru. It creates a no-win scenario. No matter what evidence you bring, the system always wins. Arguing inside the palace room by room only makes it stronger. The real task is to step outside and examine the foundation itself.

Here is what happened when I tried to do exactly that.

THE CONVERSATION

The conversation I had was about Anglican orders. Rome declared the Edwardine Ordinal defective in form. Therefore, Anglican orders are invalid. Therefore, Anglican clergy lack apostolic succession. Case closed, I was told. Settled since the sixteenth century.

I pointed out a historical problem. From 1439 until 1947, Rome’s official teaching, defined at the Council of Florence, held that the matter of priestly ordination was the handing over of the instruments, the chalice and paten. This was no local custom. It was the Church’s formal answer to what made the sacrament valid. Especially striking: Rome had long accepted Greek ordinations that lacked the instruments entirely.

Then in 1947 Pius XII issued Sacramentum Ordinis. Suddenly the instruments were no longer required. The laying on of hands alone sufficed. For five hundred years Rome had one answer.

Then it had the opposite one.

The reply came quickly. The instruments were never truly essential. They had always been symbolic. Pius XII did not change anything. He merely clarified what had always been true.

Notice what just happened there. A teaching formally defined by an ecumenical council was quietly set aside. Whatever Rome teaches today becomes what she has always believed.

Whatever she taught yesterday becomes an early draft that was never really definitive.

They even offered a wedding analogy: rings and cake do not make a marriage valid. Only the vows do. My objection, it seemed, had confused the essential with the accidental. It was a tidy answer. It was also rigged from the start. If Rome changes, that proves development. If Rome stays the same, that proves consistency. A system built so it cannot lose has stopped being theology and started being ideology wearing theology’s clothes.

THE OBJECTION

So I asked the obvious question. Is there any historical fact that would ever count against Rome’s claims? Or does the system guarantee in advance that no evidence ever could? Someone will object that I am imposing a modern, secular standard on theology. They might say the early Church did not think in terms of falsifiability. The Fathers were not Enlightenment rationalists.

But that misses the point. I am not demanding Karl Popper from the Fathers. I am simply asking whether the Church historically treated her own doctrinal judgments as genuinely open to scrutiny. For much of her history, the records show that she did. Here is the proof.

ROME ARGUING WITH HERSELF

Long before the nineteenth century, Rome’s own theologians debated these matters openly. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the imposition of hands as central to conferring the grace and power of order. Yet later medieval practice and the Council of Florence in 1439 elevated the handing over of the chalice and paten as the matter of the sacrament. Florence’s definition thus stood in tension with the Church’s greatest scholastic authority from the outset. This was no marginal dispute.

Centuries later, the French Oratorian Jean Morin devoted his life’s scholarship to the ancient ordination rites of the Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Babylonian churches. Work like his kept the historical question alive for three centuries before Rome finally settled it in 1947.

Rome was not forced by outsiders. Her own tradition had been arguing with itself through her greatest theologian and her most careful historian for five hundred years before she finally chose a side. That is not the behavior of a system in which every conclusion is already protected from historical scrutiny. It is the behavior of a Church that was, for a very long time, genuinely undecided.

WHAT NEWMAN CHANGED

Every serious discipline recognizes that a real claim must, in principle, be capable of being challenged. Scientific theories must be open to falsification. Legal arguments must survive counterexamples. Historical arguments must allow evidence that could alter conclusions. This is not a uniquely modern demand. It is intellectual honesty. For much of her history, Rome herself operated closer to this standard.

What changed the posture was John Henry Newman’s theory of doctrinal development. It gave a framework capable of absorbing historical inconsistency after the fact. Changes became clarifications. Apparent contradictions became deeper continuity. Earlier formulations could always be reread in light of later definitions. Before Newman, Rome had real historical tensions, as any ancient institution does. After Newman, she had a theory explaining why those tensions could never count against her.

THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS

I have watched sincere Christians drift toward Rome, convinced they had found a system with no loose threads. In one sense they are right. Rome offers a theology where there are no loose threads, because the system is built so every thread can be woven back in after the fact. A system from which no evidence can ever escape is not thereby proven true. It has only become unreachable. Coherence is not the same as truth. A loop that cannot lose is not the same as a loop that has won.

If you find yourself in one of these conversations, do not feel you must master every historical detail. Ask one simple question. What historical evidence would actually cause you to conclude that Rome’s claims were mistaken? Then listen carefully. Sometimes the most revealing discovery is not that a position has answered every objection, but that it has quietly reached the point where no possible objection ever could.

Certainty built on an unfalsifiable system is not certainty. It only feels that way from the inside.

The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA/REC) in Evansville. He is a church planter who has helped plant three Anglican churches He was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary. He and his wife have been married for nearly 35 years and have four children.